1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hybrid vehicles and more specifically to a design for a vehicle that combines the advantages of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and newly advanced lithium-ion industrial batteries.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hybrid vehicles are vehicles with built-in design features intended to either minimize or eliminate the vehicle's dependence on fossil fuels in order to operate. Different models of hybrid vehicles accomplish this goal in different ways. Some hybrid vehicles run on a combination of gas and electric power while others run on cleaner types of fuels and still others dispense completely with the use of gasoline.
Hybrid Vehicle Power Sources
The most common power sources for hybrid vehicles include: electricity, compressed or liquefied gas, hydrogen, gasoline and diesel fuel. Other less common sources are: electromagnetic fields, human power like pedaling and solar.
Battery Selection
The batteries that provide electric power to hybrid vehicles have been improved from the standard lead acid batteries with nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries and lithium-ion cell batteries now the preferred choices in hybrid vehicles. The advantages of lithium-ion batteries over NiMH batteries in hybrid vehicles include weight and storage capacity. To further explain, Nickel is a metal related to iron, well up on the periodic chart and it's quite dense. Lithium is in the same family as Sodium and Potassium and it is the lightest metal there is. For the same storage capacity, a NiMH battery will be smaller but the lithium-ion battery will weigh less. Also, NiMH batteries suffer from “memory effect” which may reduce the storage capacity. Since lithium-ion batteries are totally immune to “memory effect” and since the weight difference is very dramatic (a factor of two or more), the lithium battery appears to be the preferred battery at the time of this invention.
There are many reasons why inventions that eliminate or reduce the use of oil as the fuel source for vehicles are advantageous to everyone. Reduction of dependence on oil imports and effects on the environment from burning fossil fuels are among the top reasons. More importantly though, and less discussed, is the fact that oil is a limited resource, one that is very valuable in the production of plastics, pharmaceutical drugs, furniture foams, nylons, polyesters, ink, bubble gum, pesticides and fertilizers, heart valves, etc. to name a few.
Liquid natural gas is an environmental friendly and naturally abundant fuel. LNG offers higher performance and increased cruising distance over compressed natural gas since the molecules in the fuel storage tank are accelerated with compressed gas and require more storage space than liquid natural gas which is stored at −160 degrees C. (−260 degrees F.). Compressed natural gas's volumetric energy density is estimated to be 42% that of liquefied natural gas. Energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume.
The present invention of the LNG-Lithium Hybrid Vehicle (LLHV) introduces an environmental friendly hybrid vehicle design that is unique by it's utilization of liquid natural gas as the fuel source, a control system that routes the power from the LNG engine generator power to the electric motor to run the vehicle or to the lithium-ion batteries for recharging. This vehicle travels farther and runs more efficiently than current inventions because of the combination of these energy sources.